math

This is one of those "brain teasers" that often pop up on Facebook with an annoying and statistically ambiguous title like "Only 5% of the population know the answer to this puzzle!" According to The Daily Mail, this one has been floating around since December.

For once the people in the comments actually have something worth arguing about. You may not have noticed at first but the illustrations in the last equation are different than all the other ones. Let's walk through it.

First, apples definitely equal 10, that much is clear. From the next equation you can guess that each banana bunch equals four. Now we can assume that the coconuts equal two.

So the last equation should add up to 16. 2+10+4 =16 right?

BUT there's only ONE coconut half this time and only three bananas. So is that 1+10+3=14?

This has people arguing about whether the concept of the fruit is a constant number or if that number can change as the picture of the fruit changes. To make matters worse, Dr Kevin Bowman, a Mathmatics course leader at University of Central Lancashire spoke to the Daily Mail to try to "clear" things up. According to him, they can represent whatever you want since the only unambiguous fruit is the apple. Also, everything you thought about coconuts is wrong. He concluded his interview with this:

You might even say that the two coconut pieces in the third equation are different sizes, and therefore add up to three quarters or even seven eighths when put together.

In that sense, there are an infinite amount of possible answers.

So no one can know the real answer until, somehow, the commenters on Facebook reach some sort of philosophical consensus on how we treat visual representations of fruit.

Fourth grader Maddy Douglas was filling out her math homework when she came up with this super sassy answer to a word problem.

The problem sets up a scenario where a group of 4 high school girls and boys go on different dates with each other. It's one of those awful matching problems where you have to find out who X went on a date with at X time.

Youtube user Crysknife007 (purveyor of "ambient geek sleep aids and other eccentric long videos") has created a true monster out of your favorite Sesame Street vampire, with audio of The Count reading every digit of Pi out 10,000 decimal places.
The maddening video is 5.5 hours long, and includes his signature laugh in between each digit.
If you're curious how he accomplished this, you can read about the process on his blog, where he describes creating a similar video but with a rotary phone dialing each digit.
So how far can you listen before tearing out all of your hair and bashing your face against the wall?

Educational standards are always changing, and the math you took in elementary school probably bears little resemblance to what kids see today. Comedian Louis C.K., frustrated with what his kids have to deal with, posted his report to twitter. What do you think about the change in curriculum?